Polly Harvey would have been thirteen when The Final Cut was released, and I cannot
imagine her not having listened to it, to this monograph, or epitaph, which
begins with the question: “Tell me true, tell me why was Jesus crucified?” The
opening question of a record which was made available to buy at Easter. A
record which is about war, and remembrance, and wilful forgetfulness, and
eighties Britain, or is it Britain now? A Britain which less than three years ago was
ready to praise and laud Let England
Shake, a pitiless analogy of modern society in the setting of the First
World War, and which is now ready to damn its creator as an uppity agitator,
let alone anyone else from the late Alan Clark, that noted left-wing shit stirrer,
on down who regards or regarded that war with anything less, or more, than
uncritical joy, an irritating and obstructive rain on a profitable centennial
parade. A nation which has allowed itself to be forcibly pulled back from
everything that Beveridge and Attlee had once promised, so far back it might as
well be picking oakum and be run by Lord Liverpool.

“Oh Maggie, Maggie, what did we do?” asks the shaky
voice, singing a song that might have been as old as the mist rolling through
the English dell, crouching in the far corner of an old Orwell pub. “Whatever
happened to the post war dream?” Whatever happened to you, whatever happened to
me?

Whatever happened to Pink Floyd? Look at them on the
basis of the three number one albums they have had (so far; there are two more
to come in the nineties by a group trading under the name of “Pink Floyd”) and
you’d be stumped to make sense of the thing. Semi-abstract brass-driven
pastorals? A prayer to a double who was for some of the time present during its
recording? A forty-three minute scream which goes beyond primalism? If The Hurting ends with acknowledgement of
the need to break everything back down to their roots, and maybe rebuild
ourselves, then The Final Cut
systematically seals off all means of escape.

Escape for Pink Floyd at least, if this can even be
regarded as a Pink Floyd record; Michael Kamen and Andy Bown do their best to
fill the space left by Richard Wright – and they do, and what does that say
about relevance, permanence and redundancy in a group so tightly and
determinedly driven by its pilot? – and when Nick Mason fumbled with the tricky
rhythms of “Two Suns In The Sunset,” Roger Waters simply brought in stalwart
Andy Newmark to do the job.

Roger Waters, a man who is now more or less the age his
father would have been had he lived to witness The Final Cut – but if he had still been around, would The Final Cut even have been necessary? –
and a man who, if he had edited the Today
programme a couple of Thursdays ago, would almost certainly have picked the
same contributors and would not have caused a fraction of the “controversy” that
Harvey did. Moreover, a man determined to tell his story, no matter that it
might pull his group apart. Indeed Waters has admitted that by the time the
record came to be made – roughly from July to December of 1982 – there was
really no such thing as a group called Pink Floyd left, but simply a bunch of
middle-aged men who didn’t get on, hadn’t properly got on since Wish You Were Here. The record’s working
title was Spare Bricks, reflecting
its original intention of being a soundtrack album to Alan Parker’s film of The Wall, and several of its songs were
essentially leftovers from the sessions for The
Wall. This dismayed David Gilmour – he reasonably asked why these songs
were being put out “now” when they had not been deemed good enough to go on The Wall – but in the interval between
thought and expression, the Falklands War had happened, and Waters’ perspective
changed dramatically. A song written and recorded for the soundtrack, “When The
Tigers Broke Free,” which directly addresses his own father’s death in Anzio in
World War II, came out in the summer of 1982 as a stand-alone single and was
not included on The Final Cut, though
has reappeared on the current CD edition, coming between “One Of The Few” and “The
Hero’s Return.”

Recording the album was a deeply unpleasing experience
for all involved, including Waters who, feeling abandoned, has said that he and
Kamen (who also did all of the orchestral arrangements; the National Philharmonic
Orchestra appears more or less throughout the record’s entirety and is far more
prominent than, say, Gilmour’s guitar, whereas Mason’s drums are heard only
minimally) ended up putting the album together between themselves. Recording
took place in eight different studios in or around London – and Abbey Road was
one of these – and it has to be said that The
Final Cut, effectively the final statement of the group most people knew as
Pink Floyd, is one of the most merciless, claustrophobic and striking of all
number one albums.

It exists as a sort of appendix to The Wall, though is clearly designed as one continuous piece –
there is no “Comfortably Numb” but then there wasn’t meant to be – and, much
more so than Pink Floyd’s previous work, appears to have formed its music to
follow the curves, crevices and agonies of Waters’ lyrics; much of it is
performed sprechgesang in a manner,
alternately confidential and hysterical, which puts me in mind of the musical
relationship between Bill Fay’s voice and Ray Russell’s guitar on the former’s Time Of The Last Persecution – “Pictures
Of Adolf Again” and “Let All The Teddies Know” would not at all have been out
of place here. Gilmour’s guitar is far more conventional technically, but
emotionally as equally involving and pained – his interjections on “Your
Possible Pasts,” “The Fletcher Memorial Home” and “Paranoid Eyes” work
especially well, perhaps because he is used so sparsely on the record (most of
the lead vocal on “Not Now John” is sung by Gilmour). In other words, when he
comes in, it matters.

The hurt refrain on “Your Possible Pasts” – “Do you
remember me? How it used to be?” – is the nearest musically the record gets to
recognisable “Pink Floyd” (but note the ticking clock from Atom Heart Mother which reappears ominously in “One Of The Few” and
the repeated Dark Side Of The Moon
references throughout the record, e.g. Thatcher’s “quiet desperation” in “Southampton
Dock” and Waters’ own “If I show you my dark side” in the title song). “Don’t you
think,” cries Waters, “we should be CLOSER?” and in that “CLOSER” we not only
remember that once, not that long ago, wasa record called Closer, but we
also feel the lifetime of blood being poured by Waters into that word. The song
also includes Mason’s best work on the record, rhetorical, shocking snaps of
Zuccarelli holophonic-processed snare at key points (“A warning to anyone still
in command,” “Stepping up boldly, one put out his hand”); like that other
troubled 1983 album, Psychic TV’s Dreams
Less Sweet, a record in part put together by someone who once helped design
Pink Floyd’s album sleeves, it uses its headphone-friendly holophonic
sensurround to dazzling effect, but the present record is arguably the more
disturbing, explosions coming out of nowhere, screams (“Daddy, DADDY!” goes one
particularly painful one at the climax of “Two Suns In The Sunset”), always
aiming to unsettle the listener.

Some of the songs – particularly “One Of The Few,” “The
Hero’s Return” and “Paranoid Eyes” – are performed from the perspective of the
tyrannical schoolteacher in The Wall
(and portrayed unforgettably in the film by Alex McAvoy, previously best known
to Scottish television audiences as Sunny Jim, the seriously overaged cabin boy
in the cosy sitcom The Vital Spark,
about a Clyde puffer going about its comic business in central Scotland; he
reappears in the video which accompanied this album). In “The Hero’s Return” he
tries to explain why he is the way he is, how his gruff and sadistic manner is
merely a smokescreen for things he doesn’t want to remember (“Though they’ll
never fathom it/Behind my sarcasm, desperate memories lie”), in particular a
fellow gunner dying. By the time of “Paranoid Eyes,” he has drifted harshly
into alcoholism – the DT roar of Waters towards the end of the song (“The PIE
in the SKY turned OUT to be MILES TOO HIGH”) hardly rouses him. “And you hide,
hide, hide,” whispers Waters like a nightmare Chesney Allen.

Others concern themselves with Waters’ concerns about
early eighties Thatcherite Britain. “The Gunners Dream” is one of the record’s
most affecting songs in that he spells out exactly what he thought his father
(who was a schoolteacher) and his peers were fighting for, namely that the
sacrifice would have been worth it, that Britain would have become a better
place. And so the song becomes an alternate universe “Imagine” – do I even need
to stress the way Lennon haunts this album like Banquo’s ghost? It could have
been entitled Roger Waters/Plastic Ono
Band – in which Waters dreams of how things should be, mindful of the
Troubles (the 1982 Hyde Park bandstand bombing is referred to obliquely), and
then his voice reachesa quietly emotional
peak with these lines:

“And everyone has recourse to the law

And no-one kills the children anymore

And no-one kills the children anymore.”

But he knows he is only dreaming, and the “insane” of the
line “his dream is driving me insane” morphs into a horrific sustained screams
which segues seamlessly into an equally troubled tenor solo by Raphael
Ravenscroft. Troubled quietude, however, reasserts itself at song’s end, with
Waters whispering with wisps of despair: “We cannot just write off his final
scene/Take heed of the dream/Take heed.”

This is followed, on side two, by a raging tirade in
which Waters visualises all the leaders of the world – “Incurable Tyrants and
Kings,” “Colonial Wasters of Life and Limb” – coming together in a retirement
home (“Fletcher” refers to his father, Eric Fletcher Waters), followed by them
being gassed to death; his closing croon of “Is everyone in? Are you having a
nice time? Now the final solution can be
applied” (earlier in the song he announces the guests coming in two by two
and sounds remarkably like Vivian Stanshall). As a statement of extremity it is
only rivalled in this tale by the Sex Pistols. “Southampton Dock” sees “her”(i.e.
Thatcher) standing on the quayside, seeing the boys off, some to their deaths;
Waters half-speaks the words close to the ear and simultaneously screams the
same words in the far distance (a premonition of what awaits them). The
poppies, the soldier with gun in hand and knife in back; nothing has been
learned.

And yet, in the middle of all this, there is still Syd.
The title song is a deeply moving performance, even if it’s still one Roger
looking in the mirror and seeing another Roger staring back behind his
shoulder, but really there is no doubt in my mind whom the song is about. “I’m
spiralling down to the hole in the ground where I hide” – in his mother’s
basement in Cambridge? All the while, Waters is asking the listener to make the
effort, maybe even risk life and limb, to get to him, to understand him (or “Syd”)…

…”And if I’m in, I’ll
tell you what’s behind The Wall.”

The second half of that line is buried somewhat in
holophonic sound effects but Waters goes on to ask – if he opens himself up,
will she love him back, will she care for him, or will she just “sell your
story to Rolling Stone?”

Another whisper: “Would you send me packing?”

Followed by the loudest cry on the record, this attempt
by the sixties to confront the eighties, a prayer for what this tale has
perhaps always, and only, been about:

“OR WOULD YOU TAKE ME HOME?”

He thinks about ending it “but just then the ‘phone rang…I
never had the nerve to make the final cut.”

I don’t know whether any teenager was listening to this
record in Washington State or whether he was too busy getting down to The
Melvins or Hüsker Dü. But I would estimate that it was being listened to in
Abingdon, and by a teenage Dubliner who will eventually perform in Waters’
version of The Wall performed in
Berlin at the time The Wall comes down.

“Not Now John” was the “single” (and still a Top 30 hit,
though only just) with Gilmour’s yelling vocals and punk guitar riffs damning
utopia to hell, complete with scared or exultant backing singers (“Fuck! All!
That!”). The protagonist might be Alan Parker on the film set, but I don’t see
how the “John” can be anyone other than Lennon – to hell with a better world,
we have to compete, stay on this treadmill, do it for Maggie, go global, turn
into machines, kill ourselves like the “wily Japanese” do (Waters’ is a
profoundly World War II view). And so it thrashes on like the most grotesque
parody of eighties Reaganrock you ever heard, and it’s no less grotesque or
parodic for coming before most Reaganrock
– I thought of John Cale’s maniacal 1975 cover of “Heartbreak Hotel” and
inevitably Music For A New Society, which
rivals The Final Cut for tortuousness
but outdoes it in hope.

But it is the closing song, “Two Suns In The Sunset,”
which is the record’s most disturbing; this is the other end of the Love Over Gold telescope in that he is
out on the road, driving, and slowly – or quickly – it dawns on him that
nuclear holocaust is about to happen. As I said, it finishes the album’s job in
that it closes down the few rays of hope Waters allowed to penetrate his Rubik’s
cube of darkness; I would in particular point you to this passage:

“And you’ll never hear their voices (Daddy, DADDY!!)

And you’ll never see their faces

You have no
recourse to the law anymore.”

The final verse is the most horrifying verse, in terms of
lyrical imagery and story’s end, of any song on any number one album to date;
although this is not the first album to end with nuclear obliteration, it is by
some distance the least hopeful – and all the while, the music hardly raises
its voice, with just Ravenscroft’s placid, AoR tenor combining with tasteful
guitars and careful drumming, driving into the fading horizon. “Foe and friend?
We were all equal in the end,” concludes Waters, perhaps looking back at “The
End” of Abbey Road.

“The moral. What’s the moral?”
(Robbie Coltrane addressing his students in Cracker)

Apart from Kurt Loder at the aforementioned Rolling Stone, hardly anybody had a good
word to say for The Final Cut at the
time. Woeful, self-pitying self-indulgence, dull, tedious and unforgiving –
these were some of the critical terms deployed. But you have to remember the
tenor of the times; the world was still in a state of crazed anxiety about
whether it would still exist or be suddenly wiped out, and so I’d guess that Waters
felt that whatever he does say on the record, he had to say it now or never. In
a lot of ways, and particularly with the last four number one albums, we are
still in 1980* and every number one album seems to urge the guard’s cry of “Last
stop! All change, please!” – these represent the expression of fairly naked and
open feelings and emotions, and it is hardly surprising that pop decided to
turn away from this as swiftly as it could; indeed it could be argued that the
rest of 1983’s number one albums, with only a very few exceptions, are about
running away from openness, about seeking sanctuary in cheerful and/or
meaningless nonsense, or finding a refuge in a modified past, or doing its best
to ignore the world collapsing around its privileged torso. It really isn’t
that different from now, and I’m sure both Roger Waters and Polly Harvey would,
in their own very individual but linked ways, concur.

“Silence is at the beginning and end of everything in
life. This song was written with the thought that there are infinite
possibilities for humankind contained within the brilliance of the universe.”
(Charlie Haden’s liner note to his song “Silence” as included on his 1983 album
The Ballad Of The Fallen, effectively
the second album by his Liberation Music Orchestra, with arrangements of
Spanish Civil War songs and original compositions by Carla Bley, a musician
umbilically linked, via Nick Mason, to Pink Floyd. The album, which is entirely
instrumental, is maybe the most moving and searing indictment of Thatcher and
Reagan’s world to emerge from eighties music. The rear of the sleeve features a
painting done by a refugee from El Salvador and includes the following inscriptions:
“No to U.S. intervention; yanky (sic)
invader out of El Salvador – Our only crime is that we are poor – We are tired
of so many bullets sent by Ronald Reagan.”If, as Waters claims at the end of The
Final Cut, there is nothing left to defend except charcoal, then is silence
not still worth defending, in respect of what it might still cause?)

*A year in which I saw Waters closing the wall on his
audience and himself at Earl’s Court. If The
Final Cut is an adjunct to The Wall
– although I think it could act as a rebuttal – then the relatively scant
attention that this piece has paid to The
Wall may reflect the possibility that it exists independently and is a lot
more forbidding and cloistered a concept, let alone a suite of music. Did you
listen attentively to The Wall before
tackling The Final Cut? Reader, I
expected you to do so without needing to be asked, and if so you may understand
why not much needs to be said about it here. The double album, and everything
that surrounded it, deserves nothing less than a book to itself.

2 comments:

Good write-up. I wish this album was no longer relevant, but as the manufactured crises in the Falklands* and Gibraltar last year and the apparent determination to turn what should be a solemn and pained anniversary into a national festival of jingoism demonstrate, it is perhaps now more relevant than ever.

*I first listened to it just over a year ago in the wake of some particularly odious caterwauling on this front by the Government

As I'm sure most people reading this will agree, when Max Hastings says that the Falklands War saved Britain, he means it saved his class, and damn everyone else.

And we wouldn't even have needed the First World War to achieve universal franchise, or move beyond parlour song. All it did was turn brother against brother, alienate nations which should have had everything in common. And the hurt and pain is still unhealed. (No wonder Farridge wishes it had gone on longer.) If that makes someone a Trotskyist, then Peter Hitchens is still one.

Over time - and the forced removal of assumptions and groupthink, which I could easily have stuck to forever, had I wanted to live in denial - I've learned to love this record, and its predecessor. And this is great: all that needed to be said, like the record itself, with the precision of a surgeon's knife and the sadness of a grown child, his father's son more than most of us who actually knew our fathers, who must have wondered whether losing offshore radio was that much of a cross to bear, and wished - as we all do - that something so great had had the time to embrace the pluralism of this tale before it was forcibly prevented.